LETTERS of Feburary 2

British Miner Still Fighting

(This letter from British miner Peter Holden was sent to two PLP members and is a follow-up to the article appearing in the last issue of CHALLENGE. — Ed.)

Thank you both very much for your Christmas wishes and card. I’m afraid the struggle for dignity, truth and justice still remains and is ongoing.

The whole working class is under attack by the Government here (Tories/Liberals). The students have been demonstrating against the rise in tuition fees, while hospital, schools, pensioners and the disabled are all under attack!

The government is blaming the Labour Party for the current situation, to justify the horrendous cuts they’re putting into force. This will only affect the working class, not the rich.

What a great achievement to have a newspaper, CHALLENGE, with thousands of supporters around the world. Excellent!

I have multiple sclerosis and am in a wheelchair, but I keep my spirit up and try not to let it get me down. I’m still the Secretary of the “Betteshanger Social Club & Community Centre,” which was the “Betteshanger Colliery Social Club.” We have struggled and refurbished the building.

I hope this letter finds you both in good health. Please give my regards to all the comrades in the U.S. We will never forget the tremendous support you gave to the miners in the historic strike of 1984/85.

Peter, Ex-Sacked and Victimized Kent Miner

Bosses’ Hospital Closures: Racist Death Sentence for Workers

The Cook County Commissioners are closing two of the three public hospitals — Provident and Oak Forest — serving Chicago-area residents, and converting them into clinics. The new county president, Preckwinkle, says she will cut over 20% of the budget, which includes Stroger Cook County Hospital. All this means more layoffs and more deaths due to lack of access to health care for many unemployed and under-employed workers, most of whom are Southside black and Latino residents.

At a recent meeting, many workers and patients confronted an administrator who answered few of the many concerns they raised. People described how private hospitals have turned them away due to lack of insurance. They were referred to Oak Forest and Provident and/or Stroger Hospital, which is inaccessible for many in the South suburbs who have no car.

The whole department of a doctor was abolished as well as other medical services that patients have relied on. A former delivery driver said he was referred to Stroger for cancer treatment, but after a year trying to get help, he gave up. He was finally able to get help at Oak Forest.

The Commissioners have appointed a board of health professionals and businessmen and women to administer the cuts. (The chairman is the former head of Tupperware.)

They held public hearings where over 1,000 people denounced the cutbacks. However, the bosses are still planning to carry out their racist plans to save money on the backs of mostly black and Latino workers as well as many white workers depending on these facilities.

PLP has actively opposed the cuts and is supporting a nurses’ strike vote. But the unions, including SEIU and AFSCME, have done little to organize the workers against the racist cuts. Their lack of leadership reflects their disregard for the workers.

The unions have given millions from our dues money to politicians, who are our enemies, working hand-in-glove with the billionaires. Black and Latino politicians who front for the bosses are racist because they’re attacking mainly African-American, Latino and Asian patients and healthcare workers.Communists must organize workers to fight the cuts and layoffs and demand that Oak Forest and Provident stay open, with a strike if necessary.

A Hospital Worker

French Government Harasses 
Haiti Quake Victims

A coalition of civil liberty groups has commemorated the first anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti by condemning the conditions the French government has created for refugees trying to enter France from that ravaged country. A few days after the quake, the government had promised to ease their entry. The coalition published a text titled, “The victims are not welcome in the country of selective immigration.”

It said their treatment was “scandalous”; “there is a yawning gap between what was promised and what has been done.”

The government said it would ease the issuing of visas and the conditions for reuniting families and that deportations would be suspended. BUT within a few days, the windows in the prefectures for the refugees were closed and the conditions for reuniting families were never eased.

Since the earthquake immigrants from Haiti have had a harder time than other foreigners. Despite the earthquake damage, which worsened the ability to obtain identity papers, the French embassy in Haiti maintained discriminatory requirements, enabling it to reject most visa requests. The French government requires a series of documents which can only be obtained from Haitian government archives that were destroyed in the earthquake.

Thus, attempts to circumvent the French government’s legal barriers have run aground (see CHALLENGE 1/19). Seventy-five immigrants who arrived from Haiti on December 23 and 26 were immediately detained in airport waiting zones after arriving on transit visas for Bénin. Upon arrival, they all demanded admission to France under the right of asylum. Then they were admitted temporarily while filing a request at the prefecture to stay.

The government has put them through this hassle even though it violated its own laws. Its promise from a year ago, to provide safe haven for earthquake victims, follows the government’s general racist policies which have been directed against Arab and black immigrants from North Africa and sub-Sahara Africa who have been subjected to poverty wages and threats of deportation.

A Reader from France

Climate Change Spreads Diseases; Inherent in Capitalism

Diseases are spreading from the tropics to areas of the world farther from the equator where the oceans and air are steadily warming up. They’re affecting new populations who don’t have immunities to it. Plants, animals, and humans are all affected. The primary underlying cause is global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas). Underlying this use of dirty energy is the profit system (capitalism), since fossil fuels bring tremendous profits, and profits always come before people.

Global warming causes more and more heat, humidity and rain, bringing mosquitoes, ticks, and other disease carriers. Malaria and cholera, among other diseases, are seen now in parts of Asia and Africa that haven’t seen them before. Dengue fever, caused by a virus that is spread by mosquitoes and is sometimes fatal, has spread to the U.S. after being absent for three-fourths of a century.

Capitalism’s inherent racist and two-tier organization produces disparity in the management and treatments of natural disasters. Hence, the poorest, the darker-skinned, suffer the most. To see this, consider the effect of the earthquakes last year in Haiti or in Chile, or the flooding of New Orleans by Katrina.

Bark beetles, also spreading farther from the equator, are wiping out forests from the Southwest U.S. to Canada. This type of change in habitat hastens the influx of disease carriers. The bosses around the globe have no plans or means to counter these looming epidemics, and the uneven distribution of health care resources again will increase racist oppression.

Global warming, by holding more moisture in the air until it falls in torrents, is causing more droughts in some areas and floods in others. Today’s swelling rivers and extreme flooding in eastern Australia are attributed by climatologists to a strong La Niña. It is actually global warming that makes the violent weather events much more frequent.

The high water, in addition to wiping out homes, is bringing crocodiles and snakes into the middle of towns. These floods will become everyday events as more and more glaciers melt and sea levels rise, flooding coastal cities, where hundreds of millions of people live. (See Scientific American, January 2011, p. 64, “Casualties of Climate Change.”)

The capitalist governments of nations around the world twiddle their thumbs and, in order to escape responsibility for these crises, point fingers at each other, trying to gain advantage. Imperialist wars, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, consume huge amounts of money and resources that could, in workers’ hands, be used to develop clean energies, among other needs.

There is technology to use renewable and safer energy sources (such as water, wind, and biomass) but the bosses refuse. Meanwhile the bosses’ media call for major cuts in Social Security and Medicare, but only trivial cuts, if any, in spending for war  — misnamed “defense.”

Any gains against the bosses will be won by the struggles of masses of workers, but they will  only last until the bosses and their politicians take them back. Only a system run by the working class around the world, organized to satisfy our needs and not for profit, can drown the inhuman profit system in its own floods and save the planet for our children and grandchildren, let alone ourselves. 

(See PLP’s complete statement on global warming and its causes in THE COMMUNIST magazine, Winter 2010 issue, at www.plp.org).

Saguaro Rojo

Workers Hear ‘Airport Red’ on 
Tucson Murders

At the airport, many of my co-workers were shocked to learn of the horrific massacre in Tucson, Arizona. While some of us have political disagreements with the government, we agreed that terrorism by indiscriminately slaughtering everyone is not the way. It could kill innocent workers and children. 

We sent out an email to the Tucson SEIU [Service Employees International Union] expressing sympathy for the injured. My co-workers reviewed a draft of the email before it was sent. They asked, “Why did he do it”? Clearly Jared Loughner is unbalanced, but I tried to explain that it is because of the fascist political climate in Arizona. It’s filled with anti-immigrant racism, racist hate groups, and a fascist governor who cuts the budget by preventing working-class people from getting medical operations to stay alive. We know of one worker who died because of it.

This is fascism with racism being the cutting edge. I explained to an anti-Semitic guy that PLP correctly said racism, when carried to its “logical” conclusion, means not only the death of black, Latino and Asian workers, but white workers as well. This guy also had a connection to a racist anti-immigrant hate group called American Renaissance.

I told my co-workers that Arizona was like a bomb waiting to go off and that the mass murder was a reflection of conflict among the bosses for control of the Federal government. Loughner was a perfect proxy representing Arizona fascism, which is new-money bosses oppressing Latino workers in Arizona. Gifford and Judge Roll represented the federal government that is dominated by old-money Rockefeller bosses.

Many of my co-workers were surprised to hear a communist analysis like that. I told them massacres like this happen all the time in the Middle East because of different groups of bosses fighting it out over the dead bodies of Palestinian or Iraqi workers.

I explained the Progressive Labor Party is the only answer to stopping the mass murder of workers in the bosses’ dogfights both in the U.S. and globally.  We must rid ourselves of all bosses through communist revolution and have a communist society run by and for the working class. From Arizona to Palestine, fight for communist revolution! 

Airport Red